Saturday, October 22, 2011

Fall Break, Part One.

One of the perks of being a teacher (besides changing lives, of course), is that I get periodic breaks. This one happened to coincide with the end of a testing period for Jake so somehow we had the weekend with no schoolwork to ourselves. And in the spirit of Jake's studies, fall break was just what the doctor ordered.

We'll do this recap book report style...We had Friday off (Monday was a half day, reporting in at 3 but I worked the whole morning so it doesn't count) and so I started with a 4 mile walk with my friend Rachel (cute baby alert):

(these pictures are not from fall break weekend, but still portray the characters at hand)

After my green line walk (great company, great weather, great workout), I headed back towards Midtown to meet up with Chandler for lunch and downtown fun.

First we hit up City Market for lunch with McRae and then walked down Main Street a bit to grab a table outside and meet Jake post-exam. The weather was gorgeous.

Chan:

Our view:

After some fellowship with Chandler downtown, Jake and I ventured out east on Operation Upgrade. Jake's iPhone was a 3, which meant it was about 3 years old and therefore majorly in need of replacing. Buttons didn't work, the operating system wouldn't run right... it was no bueno.

After calling AT&T stores around the city, Twitter came in for the win as a local news reporter tweeted that Apple still had a lot of the 4S. So we made the haul to Germantown's Saddle Creek and arrived at "Mecca":

Thanks to a phone upgrade for a patient Jake, we were able to score the sweet little device.

Next on the agenda was some dinner with Jake's parents at RP Tracks (always in good taste) and then a trip to the movies. See, I follow Craig Brewer, a Memphian, on twitter and he had been blowing up my feed about his movie for weeks. That escalated me from "yay for Memphis, Footloose is coming out, I might rent it" to "legit, let's do this."

And that is how I found myself paying an arm and a leg for a movie on the weekend it premiered. Nonetheless, we went to Studio (our local Midtown establishment - go Midtown) and got to talk with Craig Brewer himself. Lovely guy, very nice. I hear he goes to Cafe Eclectic some so maybe I'll continue to stalk/see him out (kidding. mostly.). So after purchasing tickets and talking with Craig (he follows me on twitter now - we're tight), we went across the street for some gelato at our favorite YoLo before settling in to see the movie:

(Jake's iPhone makes its blog debut)

Footloose was a lot of fun. I love a good love story, the music was fun, the dancing made me jealous (wanted to boogie myself), the actors were well cast, and the movie was well made. Honestly, it was a solidly good movie. We really enjoyed ourselves and I found myself wanting to adopt Willard as Jake's new best friend (since his best friend moved away... tear...).

After a busy busy day, we headed home for the night, day one of our long weekend in the books.